West Yorkshire Built-up Area
West Yorkshire Built-up Area, also called the West Yorkshire Urban Area, is a large urban region defined by the Office for National Statistics. It centers on the cities of Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield, and includes the big towns of Huddersfield and Halifax. It is the fourth largest urban area in the United Kingdom.
The area covers about 487.8 square kilometres and had a population of around 1.78 million at the 2011 census, giving a density of about 3,645 people per square kilometre. Much of the area is connected by narrow strips of development, and there are large areas of agricultural land inside the boundary.
The conurbation excludes several nearby towns in West Yorkshire that are counted separately, such as Featherstone, Normanton, Castleford, Pontefract, Hemsworth, Todmorden, Hebden Bridge, Knottingley, Wetherby and Garforth.
The ONS divides the area into 39 subdivisions. Some subdivisions have no resident population because they are former or current industrial areas (for example, Rawdon is listed as Horsforth Vale and was redeveloped for housing after 2010, so it isn’t in the 2011 census). Boundaries change over time, so numbers aren’t always directly comparable (for example, Lofthouse and Stanley were merged into Wakefield; Honley into Holmfirth; Queensbury into Bradford; Shelf into Halifax).
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 08:44 (CET).